Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday February 27, 2013 @07:00PM
from the yes-no-maybe dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "As we discussed yesterday, Google is bringing a Quickoffice viewer to its new high-end Chromebook Pixel, with full editing ability expected within three months. According to TechCrunch, Quickoffice-on-Chromebooks comes courtesy of Native Client. If Chromebooks prove a hit (and Google ports Quickoffice onto devices other than the ultra-high-priced Chromebook Pixel), could that mean the beginning of the end of Microsoft Office's market dominance of the productivity software space? While Microsoft has been pushing into the cloud with software like Office 365, that's also Google's home territory. But can Google actually disrupt the game?"

At my job, almost every tool I use is an internal webapp, and I SSH / NX into my workstation from my laptop to get a command line, run Eclipse, etc. I could replace my Thinkpad with a Pixel and still run at 100% capacity. (it's a bit overkill for my needs, but the Thinkpad wasn't exactly cheap, either)

Many, many, many people have computers at work only for use with internal webapps and document editing (which can be done through webapps). Why wouldn't the Pixel work for them?

Why are we discussing whether a office viewer program which does not even having editing capabilities right now and is sure not to get them for the next few months, will beat Office? Is this a joke or what?

QuickOffice is a proprietary closed source application running on one of the most locked down computers out there, the Chromebook with Secure Boot, where you can't even install Open/LibreOffice like you can do on any Windows PC and is heavily tied to the cloud and is crippled with low storage to encourage you to put valuable files on Google servers.

Exactly. Google is squandering the opportunity to use Android to crush Windows, by instead focusing on these stupid "what do you mean you can't afford a 24/7 4G internet connection" toys.

Microsoft wants to converge the desktop and mobile experience. The most popular mobile OS is Android. Android on ARM laptops has the potential to be the final Windows killer. Google should be making Droidbooks.

Google is also squandering the opportunity to use Android to cruch Office, because if they put a team together to port LibreOffice to Android, suddenly every Android tablet user would have it as their office suite of choice, and they'd start installing it on their PCs too. Which would help prepare the ground for a corporate migration to Droidbooks.

I'll argue that it is not. Here are a few ways in which someone might consider another option better:-It's heavier than some-It cannot detach screen and/or flip in such a way to get keyboard out of the way-The keyboard doesn't have a nipple mouse-It can't run Windows-It doesn't have as much ram as others-It doesn't have as fast a processor as others-It doesn't have as much battery life as others.-It doesn't support pen input

The truth is, there is no such thing as 'the' greatest laptop on the market today. Everyone has different preferences and priorities.

The real question is though as always does Microsoft Office matter, as someone who has lived without it using then the answer is yes, and I think the lower priced chromebooks running ARM will will enterprise.

So you agree that Office matters, BUT you think Chrombooks will win out anyway? Is that what you said?

I'm not so sure.

If people are going to embrace cloud storage, Google is going to have to offer Zero Knowledge Encrypted storage, because big business, or sensitive business (medical, legal, etc) is not going to be able to use any hardware solution where they place their documents in another companies hands who in turn could hand them over to anyone with a National Security Letter.

You need a local storage capability or a secure storage where the cloud operator can't decrypt your files. (aka like SpiderOak).

Losing customers implies the problem was demand. Apple in 1Q2013 (fiscal) = 4Q2012 had supply problems not demand problems. They couldn't get the iMac out in time (21" shipped mid Nov and 27" early Dec).

Cook was pretty clear supply problems trimmed 700k off the quarter sales. Add the 700k and then adjust for 13 vs. 14 week quarter and they are down a small fraction, a few percent, not 22% nor 25%. If you are going to use Apple figures then use Apple figures.

You should reread my comment...it is implying that the Pixel is poor value...like Apple products are [come with massive mark-ups] although I suspect it probably is good value, what I perhaps should have said is "Market Price", but either way your not arguing what you think you are arguing.

And then insert some stupid comment about how LibreOffice is awesome (which it is, but in that case, why can't it disrupt MS Office?).

LibreOffice IS awesome, but there are differences between it & MSOffice that get in the way. The big holdover is medium to large businesses and in some cases schools.

1. Anyone who has an MSOffice site license or gets laptops from a large corporate account (with MSO preinstalled) will stick with MSOffice until there is a major change in the computing environment because they have a solution that works and they've already committed to the financial cost.2. Native file type support - when exchanging docum

Nothing more entertaining to try to run Google Docs in a lab on 40 laptops at once and watch the network come to a screeching halt, so I think Microsoft Office's domination is safe for a while yet. You could blame the network and the IT department, but that won't make you any friends and you'll get shot down with the argument that the licenses of Office we already have run perfectly fine on the same equipment.

And yes, this post is rife with Betteridge's Law offenses. In other words, it's not real news.

LibreOffice can't disrupt MS Office because if something is free then there must be something wrong with it (that's how they think out in the Pacific). If LibreOffice had a $400 price tag it would be way more popular than it is. (Stolen watermelon always tastes better). That's why people pirate Windows rather then use Linux - free? what's wrong with it? I'm not getting a 'professional' pirated experience if I don't use Windows.

My copy was ten dollars for 2013. My 2010 copy cost me ten dollars. Both were the "Professional" versions. Both copies were purchased through Microsoft's home use program. From what I understand if you have a work email from a company that has a Software Assurance agreement with Microsoft you're eligible. You can even just enter your email in to see if you are eligible. If it had been anything more, I wouldn't have been interested.

No, MS Home and Student has been on sale for $99 in the not-so-distant past. You were not required to be a student to use the software; there was no lie required; and what the GP said was totally accurate.

Most business use Office only because they don't know any better. Most people would think the worst is Excel, but from my experience, it is Word.

You have companies producing very important documents such as highly complex tender responses in Word with tens of thousands of sections and a few dozen contributors. The workflow is terrible when you have more than 1 person working on a big document and because how Word forces you to work, you can have the same level of precision as using a proper markup language

They need to be able to reliably and accurately interchange documents with other people and organizations who use MS Office. Close isn't good enough.

In many cases, they have business logic coded into some arcane VBA applet. The only competitor I know of that has even started to do anything with VBA is Open/LibreOffice, and even then it is very sketchy and far from enterprise-ready.

MS Office is easy to push out and manage through Group Policy. This is the same reason why IE still rules in the enterprise, even when the IE6 dependencies have finally been gotten rid of.

Seriously, MS Word is the Ford Focus of "productivity software". Now imagine businesses, instead of using a proper Caterpillar truck, hauls earth from the strip mine with convertible Ford Focuses instead. That's basically what's happening in offices across the globe right now.

LaTeX produces a superior product... I don't know of anything that, on the back end, typesets so elegantly, and on the front end, allows an author to focus on content so well.
But think about it. Using LaTeX requires --- perish the thought --- a/brain/. An active, working one at that.
So it's a non-starter in about 99.9% of the world's office environments.

The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.

True. On the other hand... Chromebooks are more attractive to businesses than they are to consumers, because there's no administration to be done. Office is a big barrier to Chromebook adoption, but if Google can convince businesses that Quickoffice and Docs can accomplish the same purpose, that barrier falls.

I'm going to stop short of saying it'll happen, but it's far from inconceivable.

The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.

True. On the other hand... Chromebooks are more attractive to businesses than they are to consumers, because there's no administration to be done. Office is a big barrier to Chromebook adoption, but if Google can convince businesses that Quickoffice and Docs can accomplish the same purpose, that barrier falls.

I'm going to stop short of saying it'll happen, but it's far from inconceivable.

Of course it's not inconceivable, but is it worth a front-page./ post title? I'd say it isn't. You might as well ask if Apple plans on going into the search business. I'd say they're equally likely (in that both companies would like for these to be viable, but both assertions are very very bad bets).

The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.

Steve Balmer said the the iPhone would fail because enterprise wanted a phone with a keyboard [its quite famous]. I don't know if its true about enterprise adopting quickoffice, but the days of enterprise influencing your purchasing habits have long gone.

The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.

Steve Balmer said the the iPhone would fail because enterprise wanted a phone with a keyboard [its quite famous]. I don't know if its true about enterprise adopting quickoffice, but the days of enterprise influencing your purchasing habits have long gone.

Like the GP pointed out, consumers don't buy MS Office (they pirate MS Office), it's companies and organisations who pay for MS Office and who finance its development. If Open/Libre office with a price tag of $0.00 running on Windows can't topple MS Office what hope does Quick Office on Chrome OS have?

LibreOffice is much better than QuickOffice - and it seems to have had minimal impact on the juggernaut that is MS Office.

It's a bit like Google and other search engines. In theory one could come along and topple Google. In reality, the reason that Google (and MS Office) are in the position they are in is that "good enough" isn't enough to disrupt the market leader.

Think about what it would take to get you to shift from Google to Bing. Bing wouldn't need to be as good as Google, it would need to be obviously *better*.

QuickOffice doesn't have to be better than LibreOffice to disrupt MS Office - it's got to be quite obviously better.

QuickOffice doesn't have to be better than LibreOffice to disrupt MS Office - it's got to be quite obviously better.

Actually Libreoffice is better than Microsoft Office in many ways, Google has Branding [and Money, influence and power], something Libreoffice unfortunately lost [Much to the disgrace of the Apache foundation]. Lets be honest Microsfoft Office in not very good, if it hadn't been for an incredibly entrenched monopoly [or open file formats] it would have been replaced years ago.

It only takes a generation for a monopoly like that to disappear. I see that with traditional telephones vs. Skype. My son (8) and his circle of friends (6-16) all have smart phones. You would think that they would call each other a lot. They don't. They use Skype almost exclusively. They will sit on their cell phones talking to each other via Skype on the phones. For these kids, the "phone" part of the smart phones is for calling your parents and ordering pizza. For talking to peers you use Skype. My first instinct was to wince at their choice, but I very quickly realized that the problem was mine and that I was falling prey to being used to the traditional phone systems network effect. For these kids, the network effect is pushing Skype over the traditional 10 digit phone system. When new kids join the group, they are quickly pushed to install Skype if they want to be involved in the groups activities.

Will these kids switch to the traditional phone system when they hit 18? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. I have a feeling that they will use the 10 digit phones for what they have to, but that those of us that predate Skype and it's ilk will be dragged into the much better future of post Bell communication.

If these kids started trading text documents, I don't think it would take long for LibreOffice to topple MS Office in their demographic.

I don't know. I keep seeing LibreOffice showing up in more and more households. I started using it because it is just more convenient to download it and use it than it is deal with buying MS Office. Yes, the price difference matters, but the convenience of not having to deal with a transaction and any kind of DRM is the real reason. MS Office is just more hassle than it is worth.

That being said, I don't do a lot of writing. For 90% of my word processing, (like this) a text box in the browser is more than enough. I am not writing huge novels. I am not doing enterprise level accounting. But, I do believe that I am in the majority in my needs. I tend to use 4 word processors:

Notepad: When I specifically want to strip special characters and formatting.
Wordpad: When I want a scratch pad that supports simple formatting
Google Docs: When I want to collaborate on a document
LibreOffice: When a want a complex (relatively speaking) document

I have simply never created a document that LibreOffice wasn't more than adequate for. Word processing reached maturity some time between 1997 and 2000. Word was the best word processor around that time, and thus reached maturity first. I can't pin the specific time that LibreOffice/OpenOffice reached maturity, but it was more than a version ago. We are now in an attrition phase. Word is still prettier than LibreOffice, but for the vast majority of users it is only prettiness and momentum that holds people to Word. Every time a kid just downloads LibreOffice because he doesn't know yet that he is suppose to be tied to MS, the MS juggernaut gets a little weaker.

Yes, everyone's always wanted to pay $1000+ for a computer that they don't own that has worse specs than one half the price.

I know Apples computer sales have taken a massive hit this quarter, but this is about Chrome. Who have chromebooks at $200[they are the machine at half the price] and at $1200 [that comes with a 2560 x 1700 touchscreen] attacking both ends of the market. I wonder where HP's chromebooks are going to end up:)

The real question is can Native Client become a viable portable GUI toolkit to rival HTML5 for stuff that can't be done easily (or well) with HTML5. If so, then eventually the Chromebook model will fly. Currently, Chrombooks' being limited to HTML isn't good enough for most people's needs. But if and when all the software most people need can be delivered efficiently over 'the web' (with NC expanding what that means), then the migration may well begin.

Certainly if the QuickOffice NC comes up to LibreOffice standards, MSOffice is in for trouble. Today, Google Docs vs. full blown Office isn't a real comparison.

Of course, it's all a big if - multiple ifs in fact. Java was supposed to do all this 10 years ago. But things are very different today from where they were 10 years ago, so you can't assume history will repeat itself. Is Native Client any good? Is it open enough that it can be implemented in browsers other than Chrome (or would that inevitably lead to the kind of fragmentation that killed client-side Java)? Who knows, maybe Android will become the portable toolkit devs need, and client apps will remain relatively fat. To me, Native Client seems more flexible. You have the option of running apps thin, and there's nothing to prevent you from using the NC toolkit to run locally-installed apps as well. It's just the latest 'the browser is the OS' model - but maybe this one's good.

Currently, Chrombooks' being limited to HTML isn't good enough for most people's needs. But if and when all the software most people need can be delivered efficiently over 'the web' (with NC expanding what that means), then the migration may well begin.

Portable use of notebooks is closely linked with their offline use. There are plenty of locations where you cannot, or do not dare to, use WiFi. Offline use of a notebook stops you from using web-based applications. Most notebook uses are comfortable with

There are plenty of locations where you cannot, or do not dare to, use WiFi.

Bingo. That right there is why I, personally, need a full-blown laptop for my work. I need to access systems on private networks that don't touch anything outside pretty much every day. I need special tools that no one is going to bother porting to the cloud. I need port sniffers and camera detection programs and intrusion panel configuration tools and, and, and... Do the ladies in our accounting department need that? No,

Offline use of a notebook stops you from using web-based applications.

An HTML app can run fine locally. Use an HTML5 app manifest to cache the app code, and LocalStorage to cache the content.

And yet apart from the venerable TiddlyWiki and some Firefox extensions, neither of which uses HTML5, none of the browser-based apps I use do this. The problem is no longer technical, rather it's that every bloody company with a web application (including Google) wants you to connect and sign in, so they can abuse your

Over the years, I've kept tabs on, and used to one degree or another, various Office alternatives. Apple's Pages. OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. Etc. None of them are 100% compatible with Microsoft's file formats. For the type of work I do (law-and-motion briefs, appellate briefs, etc.), there are strict formatting requirements (e.g., line numbers 1-28 down the left side of the page, double-line borders, specific font and margin requirements, page limits, etc). There's also quite often a need to exchange documents with opposing counsel, for, e.g., joint stipulations. Finally, I need to be able to submit documents to the judge's chambers in Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect.WPD) format, and they have to look right when the judge opens them. The judiciary isn't going to go with OOo anytime soon (they're still slavishly tied to WordPerfect!)...

None of the 'Office alternatives' has been able to work with a document created by 'real' Office and retain its formatting; likewise, none of the documents I've created using Pages or OOo or... has looked anything close to what it should (all line numbering/borders gone, etc) when opened in 'real' Office.

For even moderately complex documents, the alternatives, including Google Docs (a/k/a/ Drive), QuickOffice, etc., do not create or properly work with fully Word compatible documents, and hence I cannot use them in my profession. Office 2011 is a cost of doing business for me.

There's also quite often a need to exchange documents with opposing counsel, for, e.g., joint stipulations. Finally, I need to be able to submit documents to the judge's chambers in Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect.WPD) format, and they have to look right when the judge opens them. The judiciary isn't going to go with OOo anytime soon (they're still slavishly tied to WordPerfect!)...

Even MS Office doesn't open MS Office files properly. Try opening a DOC file with Word 2007, save it in DOCX, import it it using the filter in Word 2003 and save it back in DOC format again. Yes, things break if you have a moderately complex document. Maybe not as obvious as if you imported it into OOO and then back to DOC, but it's not seamless.

The problem is that the DOC format sucks. The DOCX format sucks even more. That "standard" was designed so that there would never be any real interoperability between "implementations" unless it was the MS implementation.

The judiciary isn't going to go with OOo anytime soon (they're still slavishly tied to WordPerfect!).......
For even moderately complex documents, the alternatives, including Google Docs (a/k/a/ Drive), QuickOffice, etc., do not create or properly work with fully Word compatible documents, and hence I cannot use them in my profession. Office 2011 is a cost of doing business for me.

So there are no formattting issues when a docoument is created in Word and opened in WordPerfect?

The only thing that can hope to topple MS Office is an open document format. Microsoft has a format in ISO but it's not quite accurate enough to do an independant implementation and has many vague descriiptions of behaviors and/or descriptions of behaviors that references things not part of the office suite. (I'm sure most of us followed the whole ISO certification thing... they "fast tracked" a standard which wasn't complete or accurate and has yet to be fully implemented.)

So OOXML is still quite proprietary and no one can faithfully implement it based on the ISO speciification alone. And so since MS Office documents are still the defacto standard in business and government, nothing else but Microsoft Office can be used to access the data faithfully.

The only thing that can hope to topple MS Office is an open document format. Microsoft has a format in ISO but it's not quite accurate enough to do an independant implementation and has many vague descriiptions of behaviors and/or descriptions of behaviors that references things not part of the office suite. (I'm sure most of us followed the whole ISO certification thing... they "fast tracked" a standard which wasn't complete or accurate and has yet to be fully implemented.)
So OOXML is still quite proprietary and no one can faithfully implement it based on the ISO speciification alone.

They did eventually describe the stranger parts of the specification (e.g. 'autoSpaceLikeWord95'). The problem is that OOXML is basically an XML-serialized dump of MS Office guts; it wasn't designed from the ground up with interoperability in mind like ODF was, so interoperability is very hard. The spec runs to literally thousands of pages.

The new version of Office is supposed to include the option to save as "OOXML Strict", which should cut back on some of the deprecated junk (such as VML) in the OOXML spec. But I don't think this will be enabled by default, and even if it was, the old documents will continue to be around for years to come and will still have to be dealt with.

Google is one of the few organizations on the planet (other than Microsoft) with the resources to produce a good OOXML document reader/writer, so it's a shame that their efforts here have been so lackluster.

OOXML has some serious problems, but "proprietary" isn't really one of them. OOXML is actually two standards: OOXML Transitional and OOXML Strict. OOXML Strict is, by most accounts, a reasonable standard -- some bits open enough to interpretation that there will still be some problems between implementations, but HTML has the same issues.

OOXML Transitional, on the other hand, is filled with specified items that are just holdovers from MS's native implementation(s) of Office file formats. This is, more-or

I'm a little tired of this quote being misused without reading the article on wikipedia. From that tiny article

"any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."

If you've seen sites like TechCrunch or Business Insider they are fond of writing articles with salacious titles like the one above. The article titles are deliberately inflammatory and custom-designed to create click-through traffic as well as troll-ridden "comments" where people heatedly argue about the merit or lack of merit (almost always the latter) of the article's poorly-researched content. For those reasons I've deliberately chosen not to follow those sites any more.

The OP assumes so much it's ridiculous. Office is the Sun; QuickOffice is a microscopic dot on the Sun. Of the Fortune 1000 how many, realistically, use Chromebooks? Or Google Apps, even? It's creeping up there surely, but so few it's not even a statistical aberration yet.

Long-term there is no question more and more office functions will move to the web and they will be used by more and more companies - probably mostly the small, sub-1000-5000 employee companies. The apps are getting very good but there will always be a large percentage of corporations who did not want any apps or data sitting outside the company LAN/WAN, period. In 10-15 years we may laugh about how silly we were to use apps installed on our computers but for the foreseeable future it's MS Office for the VAST majority of large-ish companies and the business community out there.

use Chromebooks? Or Google Apps, even? It's creeping up there surely, but so few it's not even a statistical aberration yet.

I remember Balmer laughing at Linux being such a small percentage. Its kind of ironic that you would try to do the same in they year Android is set to overtake window as the primary OS, an OS Microsoft Office does not run on, but Google Docs does.

So it's time to lift the monopoly restrictions on Microsoft, don't you think?

Absolutely, Microsoft should simply be banned from having a browser at all, they have set back the internet years, due to their monopoly abuse, and are still subverting open standards for their own ones.

In fact we should look at Microsoft [continuing] criminal abuses, and say "Never Again", Android, IOS, even tiny OSes Like WindowsRT should have legal protection for replacing the browser, and an option screen to select a few browsers, so it never happens again.

I think I will invoke Betteridge's law of headlines here. The simple answer is no. Quickoffice on Chromebook is a bit like a pocket knife. Microsoft Office is a similar to a kitchen knife. They both have their purposes, and they are designed for different market niches. Yes sometimes there are overlaps. However in this case the overlap is not big enough.

Many moons ago, I started working for a company that was [cough] lax in their licensing of productivity software. They griped about how much it would cost to get their licenses in order. I got the relevant VeeP to install OpenOffice and try it for a month. He asked me for help on a couple of minor issues during that time and, at the end of the month, he said he'd been able to do everything he needed to do without ever opening the old software once. He was able to open, edit, and save every document and exchange documents within the company and with our clients and vendors with no trouble at all. "Great! So I can develop a plan to transition us to OpenOffice." "No. I just don't feel comfortable using something that doesn't cost money."

By the time I left the company, our licenses were in order and we had a new VeeP who embraced open source, free, etc. software but it was an uphill battle that shouldn't have been a battle at all.

Forget the clickbait question posed. As the one (!) commenter on the Slashdot Business Intelligence post asked,

What advantage does QuickOffice have over the existing Google Docs?

Google Docs already runs in the browser that's the central focus of Chromebooks/ChromeOS. Offline Google Drive/Google Docs editing has been available on any computer running Chrome since version 20 last year and works well [cnet.com],

So why is Google screwing around with Native Client (which will never run in other browsers), developing a separate codebase and another UI? There's a part of Google that believes in the open web, and then there are all the groups doing Android and Native Client and Dart and whatever. Either upper management is too weak to corral all the divisions, or they're happy to develop proprietary ecosystems just in case one succeeds the way Android did.

Most of what I've seen Excel get used for in an office setting would be better served by a database....

But the point you make is fair enough, and the point I was going to make: people aren't going to invest in a new platform without a major impetus to go looking for a new platform. If the one they have works for what they're doing, then it's generally less hassle to keep buying it. This is why some banks are still running DOS....

Until Microsoft stops selling corporate licenses and forces everybody to Office Online where they can charge a monthly tithe, business simply isn't going to look elsewhere. It's coming... They're already trying to force home users to an online version... but I doubt Microsoft is stupid enough to think that business will happily accept switching to a platform where they don't have control over the files themselves, and home users will continue to buy the monthly tithe version of MS Office, because that's what they have at work. Very savvy, really....

The reason the new Chromebook Pixel has been panned by reviewers is simple:

On a normal laptop: You can run chrome and every other application.On the Pixel: You can only run chrome.

So why would I pay the same price for a device which limits what I can run? Windows 8 tablets have tradeoffs from their ARM/Windows RT compatriots. They have worse battery life, they weigh more and they cost more. The Pixel is like paying $1200 for a windows tablet that only ran IE.

Most of what I've seen Excel get used for in an office setting would be better served by a database....

That's true. But the average user isn't technically savvy enough to configure a database (and even if they could, IT policy might prohibit it), while that same user can come up with something quick-and-dirty in Excel. The ease of use makes up for the limited feature set and sub-par performance.

In theory, these Excel "apps" should be replaced with real databases by IT once they become an important part of business logic, but in practice, that seldom happens, and the original hacked-together solution continues to be used for many years.

Office 365 lets me use Excel to setup my spreadsheets and then enter in data via a web service.

Google Docs always require spreadsheet.

No, you can setup a spreadsheet and use Google Apps Script to build a web app (which can also be accessed as a web service) to accept data. And you could do that for quite some time before Office 365 was even available.

Microsoft can and will cause compatibility pain with Quickoffice, with Microsofts marketshare 0wning the enterprise, this will cause their ball to keep rolling, and others to lose pace

Microsoft can be as disruptive as it can, but increasingly Office is looking very shaky in the post pc world....how well is the surface selling? how about windows phone? clearly Office is not selling hardware. Yet alternative hardware from Apple and Google are outselling Windows several times.

Its not that Microsoft is not still the horribly destructive monopoly it always was, its just that *that* monopoly is just not as ripe for abuse as it once was.

Except that as an individual, I don't care to--- and won't--- pay for MS Office. Is MSO better than LibreOffice? It can be argued both ways. Is it enough better for/my needs/ that I'm willing to pay for it? No way.

If the differences are worth the money to you, go buy it. Who cares.

As long as I don't have to buy it, I'm happy.

There is only one thing I haven't yet been able to do with free software: scanning and OCR, and that picture is changing too.

I work in an educational setting and we use Google stuff. Everyone hates it. Teachers have MacBook Pros and kids have MacBook Airs with Google Apps. No one likes Google Apps. No one. People want traditional installed MS Office or Office 365.

I really doubt that "Everyone" part. Kids don't give a damn. My nieces and nephews are happy using Google Apps/Google Docs to submit homework, and as they acquire tablets they love just having the documents available on all their devices.